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WASHINGTON -- Leaders of religious colleges made a case for faith-based education at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities Presidents' Conference and addressed concerns about how religious higher education is viewed by the wider public.

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Hamza Yusuf, the president of Zaytuna College, a Muslim liberal arts college in California, described what he saw as a growing hostility toward religion within secular higher education. "For religious people, the secular institutions have become increasingly hostile to religion," Yusuf said. "Faith-based people find themselves often confronted by professors that are aggressively anti-theistic, anti-religious, and put forward the idea that somehow religion is superstition. This belies the fact that all of the great traditions of the world were deeply committed to reason.

"For me, just having safe places where people that actually are devotional can come to and not be offended by [having] their sensibilities attacked, I think that's extremely important," Yusuf said.